In April, as the world marks the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick's Nobel Prize-winning description of the DNA double helix, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will look beyond the historic sequencing of the human genome to new and future studies of how variations in our genes can interact with the environment to cause disease.

In cooperation with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism , the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will host a half-day public symposium beginning at 8:30 a.m. April 16 in the Masur Auditorium of the Clinical Center (Building 10) NIH, Bethesda, Md., on Genetic Variation and Gene-Environment Interaction in Human Health and Disease. The meeting will provide opportunities for an in-depth consideration of DNA variations that can interact with environmental triggers to cause disease.

Although we all have the same genes, individual genes vary slightly in each of us, making some of us far more susceptible to environmental insults and chemicals than others are. Some smokers get lung cancer, for example, while others do not.

Talks on DNA variation in gene-environment interaction research and its implications to human disease will be presented. NIEHS Deputy Director Samuel Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., and Lisa Brooks, Ph.D., Program Director, Genetic Variation and Genome Information for NHGRI, will chair the symposium.

For more information contact David Brown, NIEHS, (919) 541-5111.